Dynalist
The next app an earlier project by the creators of Obsidian. During the roam research craze I looked into outliners. It is a class of note taking apps where you can have infinitely nested bulletpoints so you can zoom in and use any bullet point as header with a list of its children as body. Dynalist is one of the first of these outliners and I believe no longer supported. It still works on autopilot but I would consider it feature complete.
Look at feel
Dynalist is a fully online outliner with browser access and a mobile app. One cool thing is the bullet points cause an immediate structure to the notes. You try to write atomically as possible and you can show and hide subtrees at any time. You can write bigger paragraphs by doing shift+enter to do a newline but in general it is recommended to write small notes.
The tech
Since it is a web based solution (with mobile app that syncs to it) I don't have visibility into the data format. I assume it is a simple database where every bullet point has an ID you can refer to using linking.
What I liked
It works!
I feel dynalist is one of the most straightforward pieces of software out there. With no pretension, it highlights what it can do and it does it pretty well.
Mobile app!
It has a standalone mobile app which worked pretty well.
Cheap!!
It was significantly cheaper than Roam Research at the time (which had no mobile app) with basically the same functionality (maybe lacking the graph view).
What did not work for me
It's been a while, but the main reason I stopped using it is:
It works only for a subset of information
I love the implied structure of outliners but it does not work for every kind of information, including blog article outlines, letters or anime reviews. Even things like an address had some friction to being added. It went away from the personal-wiki I was trying to achieve.
Infinite list of infinitely nested lists is all you actually get
Dynalist is a pure outliner. It works exactly as promised and it works pretty well. It's just that pure outliner is probably not exactly what I need. You can add tags which allows some sort of search but I was not sure whether to add tags to every bullet point, top bullet point or internal bullet point. It was not possible to make templates for recipes or things I often repeat. It was great for things that are actually lists, but not great for all life information.
Even with lists, it shows folders
In the screenshot above I still had to use some sort of folders for these infinite lists, so it is still a bit file-based. They are probably not real files, but the notion of a file system bothered me more than I am willing to admit.
It is not self organizing
There is an inbox page where I can share stuff to from my phone, but the followup friction to put it somewhere was pretty high and I just ended up with a inbox page full of random snippets which were never used to do anything. Bullet points being atomic units means there is little reuse of templates / formats and a lot of structure is self imposed, which is hard to maintain long term
No plugins, customization or API access
One annoying thing was while there is web access, there is no API I can use to query or modify the data and there is no end-user programming aspect to it.
Online only
All the data was on some online server, which I personally trust (for no objective reason), but it did mean I had trouble accessing my data at times of poor connectivity on my side.
Outcome
I ended my premium subscription after 1 year and migrated all my data out to obsidian again before trying something else.